HARQ & ARQ and its recent applications by Rami Eyada

Hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) is a variation of the ARQ (Automatic repeat-request) error control method. What is ARQ?? Automatic Repeat request (ARQ) (or Automatic Repeat-Query) is an error control method for data transmission which uses acknowledgments and timeouts to achieve reliable data transmission. An acknowledgment is a message sent by the receiver to the transmitter to indicate that it has correctly received a data frame or packet. A timeout is a reasonable point in time after the sender sends the frame/packet; if the sender does not receive an acknowledgment before the timeout, it usually re-transmits the frame/packet until it receives an acknowledgment or exceeds a predefined number of re-transmissions. Types of ARQ protocol are: 1- Stop-and-wait ARQ: Is the simplest kind of ARQ method a stop-and-wait ARQ sender sends one frame at a time after sending each frame, the sender doesn't send any further frames until it receives an ACK signal after receiving a good frame, the receiver sends an ACK If the ACK does not reach the sender before a certain time, known as the timeout, the sender sends the same frame again. This behavior is the simplest Stop-and-Wait implementation. However, in a real life implementation there are problems to us this method. 2- Go-Back-N ARQ: The receiver process keeps track of sequence number of the next frame it expects to receive, and sends that number with every ACK (Acknowledge character) it sends. The receiver will ignore any frame that does not have the exact sequence number it expects -- whether that frame is a "past" duplicate of a frame it has already ACK'ed or whether that frame is a "future" frame past the lost packet it is waiting for. Once the sender has sent all of the frames in its window, it will detect that all of the frames since the first lost frame are outstanding, and will go back to sequence number of the last ACK it received from the receiver process and fill its window starting with that frame and continue the process over again. 3- Selective Repeat ARQ: The receiver process keeps track of the sequence number of the earliest frame it has not received, and sends that number with every ACK it sends. If a frame from the sender does not reach the receiver, the sender continues to send subsequent frames until it has emptied its window. The receiver continues to fill its receiving window with the subsequent frames, replying each time with an ACK containing the sequence number of the earliest missing frame. Once the sender has sent all the frames in its

window, it re-sends the frame number given by the ACKs, and then continues where it left off. (It Select the frame number that is missing and request it)

These protocols reside in the Data Link Layer or Transport Layer of the OSI model (Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model which is an abstract description for layered communications and computer network protocol design. In its most basic form, it divides network architecture into seven layers which, from top to bottom, are 1- Application Layer 2- Presentation Layer 3- Session Layer 4- Transport Layer 5- Network Layer 6- Data-Link Layer 7-Physical Layer It is therefore often referred to as the OSI Seven Layer Model.) A variation of ARQ is Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) which has better performance, particularly over wireless channels, at the cost of increased implementation complexity. Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) is a variation of the ARQ error control method. In standard ARQ, error-detection information (ED) bits are added to data to be transmitted (such as cyclic redundancy check, CRC). * A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is a type of function that takes as input a data stream of any length, and produces as output a value of a certain space, commonly a 32-bit integer. The term CRC denotes either the function or the function's output. A CRC can be used as a checksum to detect accidental alteration of data during transmission or storage. CRCs are popular because they are simple to implement in binary hardware, are easy to analyze mathematically, and are particularly good at detecting common errors caused by noise in transmission channels. In Hybrid ARQ, forward error correction bits *(FEC is a system of error control for data transmission, whereby the sender adds redundant data to its messages, also known as an error correction code. This allows the receiver to detect and correct errors (within some bound) without the need to ask the sender for additional data.)

Are also added to the existing Error Detection (ED) bits (such as Reed-Solomon code or Turbo code). As a result Hybrid ARQ performs better than ordinary ARQ in poor signal conditions, but in its simplest form this comes at the expense of significantly lower throughput in good signal conditions. There is typically a signal quality crossover point below which simple Hybrid ARQ is better, and above which basic ARQ is better. What Are Reed-Solomon code or Turbo code? Reed-Solomon error correction is an error-correcting code that works by oversampling a polynomial constructed from the data. The polynomial is evaluated at several points, and these values are sent or recorded. Sampling the polynomial more often than is necessary makes the polynomial over-determined. As long as it receives "many" of the points correctly, the receiver can recover the original polynomial even in the presence of a "few" bad points. Turbo codes are a class of high-performance error correction codes which are finding use in deep space satellite communications and other applications where designers seek to achieve maximal information transfer over a limited-bandwidth communication link in the presence of data-corrupting noise.

The simplest version of HARQ is: Type I HARQ: This adds both ED (error-detection information) and FEC (forward error correction) information to each message prior to transmission. When the coded data block is received, the receiver first decodes the error-correction code. If the channel quality is good enough, all transmission errors should be correctable, and the receiver can obtain the correct data block. If the channel quality is bad, and not all transmission errors can be corrected, the receiver will detect this situation using the error-detection code, then the received coded data block is discarded and a retransmission is requested by the receiver, similar to ARQ. Type II HARQ: It transmits only ED bits or only FEC information and ED bits on a given transmission, typically alternating on successive transmissions. To understand the difference between Type I and Type II Hybrid ARQ, consider the size of ED and FEC added information: detection typically only adds a couple bytes to a message, which is only an incremental increase in length. FEC, on the other hand, can often double or triple the message length with error correction parities. In terms of throughput, standard ARQ typically expends a few percent of channel capacity for reliable protection against error, while FEC ordinarily expends half or more of all channel capacity for channel improvement.

Only Type I Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) suffers the capacity loss in strong signal condition. Type II Hybrid does not, because FEC bits are only transmitted on subsequent retransmissions as needed. In strong signal Type II Hybrid ARQ performs with as good capacity as standard ARQ. In poor signal conditions Type II Hybrid ARQ performs with as good sensitivity as standard FEQ. In practice, incorrectly received coded data blocks are often stored at the receiver rather than discarded, and when the retransmitted block is received, the two blocks are combined. While it is possible that independently decoded, two given transmissions are not possible to decode error-free, it may happen that the combination of all the previously erroneously received transmissions gives us enough information to correctly decode. There are mainly two ways of re-combining in HARQ:

Chase combining:

Every retransmission contains the same information (data and parity bits). One could think of every retransmission adding extra "energy" to the received transmission.

Incremental redundancy:

Every retransmission contains different information than the previous one. At every retransmission the receiver gains knowledge of extra information. An example of incremental redundancy HARQ is HSDPA: The data block is first coded with a punctured 1/3 Turbo code. *(puncturing is the process of removing some of the parity bits after encoding with an error-correction code. This has the same effect as encoding with an errorcorrection code with a higher rate, or less redundancy. However, with puncturing the same decoder can be used regardless of how many bits have been punctured, thus puncturing considerably increases the flexibility of the system without significantly increasing its complexity) Then during each (re)transmission the coded block is usually punctured further (i.e. only a fraction of the coded bits are chosen) and sent. The punctuation pattern used during each (re)transmission is different, so different coded bits are sent at each time. Although the HSDPA standard supports both chase combining and incremental redundancy, it has been shown that incremental redundancy performs almost always better than chase combining, at the cost of increased complexity. HARQ can be used in stop-and-wait mode or in selective repeat mode also but Stopand-wait is simpler, but waiting for the receiver's acknowledgment reduces efficiency. Thus multiple stop-and-wait HARQ processes are often done in parallel in practice. When one HARQ process is waiting for an acknowledgment, another process can use

the channel to send some more data. There are other forward error correction codes can be used in HARQ scheme besides Turbo code, e.g. extended irregular repeataccumulate (EIRA) code and Efficiently-Encodable Rate-Compatible (E2RC) code, both of which are Low Density Parity Check Code.

Applications:
HARQ is used in HSDPA and HSUPA which provides high speed data transmission on downlink and uplink respectively for mobile phone networks such as UMTS, and in the IEEE 802.16-2005 standard for mobile broadband wireless access, also known as "mobile WiMAX ". It also has been used in 3GPP Long Term Evolution. HARQ is generally implemented in hardware, rather than in software.

Recently:
Sep 10, 2008 Mark Stambaugh, Agilent Technologies did apply HARQ in the LTE system and as it was expected HARQ Process did Boost LTE Communications. Regardless of what were doing, we all want to receive information quickly and free of error. Obtaining all of the information we need the first time around would be our first choice. But with complex mobile radio systems and an increasingly noisy environment, this isnt always possible. So if we dont get the data the first time, we still expect it to arrive intact eventually and with minimal delay. Network operators must support these demands while using minimal resources. For example, the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard takes advantage of adaptive coding and modulation (AMC) *(AMC: streaming data, as they adapt to localized changes in the characteristics of the data, and don't require a first pass over the data to calculate a probability model) in addition to the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) process. This is critical to minimize the turnaround time and maximize the data throughput of the system. The telecommunications industry has used the Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) layer 2 protocol for many years to ensure that data is sent reliably from one node to another. In regular ARQ, error-detecting (ED) codes such as cyclical redundancy checking (CRC) and a sliding window are used to identify when an error has occurred in a transmission. If errors are detected, the destination requests a retransmission from the source. During good radio conditions, ARQ can be considered very efficient, as no additional forward error correction (FEC) bits are added to the basic data to be transmitted. Yet bandwidth efficiency will suffer significantly in poor channel conditions due to excessive retransmissions. Hybrid ARQ performs better than regular ARQ in poor signal conditions, but in its simplest form, this comes at the expense of significantly lower throughput in good signal conditions. There is typically a signal quality

crossover point below which simple hybrid ARQ is most efficient and above which basic ARQ is the best solution. The simplest version of HARQ, Type I HARQ, in addition to ED adds FEC information to each message prior to transmission. If channel quality is sufficiently good, all transmission errors should be correctable and the receiver can decode the data block correctly. If the channel quality is poor and not all transmission errors can be corrected, the data block will be discarded and the receiver (similar to ARQ) will request a retransmission. Although ED adds only a few bits to each transmission, the additional FEC bits will add significant overhead to each transmission. In periods of good channel quality, it will significantly reduce the user data rate and therefore the bandwidth efficiency. Type II HARQ is a significantly more sophisticated solution that transmits a subset of the data, ED, and FEC bits on a given transmission. Successive transmissions include a different subset of these bits. In Type II HARQ, the first transmission contains enough data, ED, and FEC bits to decode the transmission in good channel conditions, but not in poor conditions. If this first transmission is received error-free, the transmitting node will prepare and transmit the next block of data. If the data from the first transmission is received in error, though, the second transmission will contain a different set of data, ED, and FEC bits. If received error-free, the transmitting node will prepare and transmit the next block of data. Error correction can be attempted by combining the information received from both the first and second transmissions in a process known as incremental redundancy (IR). Each subsequent transmission is combined with earlier transmissions until the packet is received correctly. Only Type I HARQ suffers the capacity loss when channel quality is good. Type II hybrid does not, because the code rate is iteratively reduced on subsequent retransmissions only if they are required. When channel quality is good, Type II HARQ obtains similar channel capacity as standard ARQ, eliminating unnecessary bandwidth inefficiencies. Type II HARQ uses a mother code that can be punctured to achieve the desired code rate. For LTE, this mother code is a rate 1/3 turbo code. This code contains systematic bits, which means the input and ED bits are present verbatim in the output. The first transmission of the packet would send mostly these systematic bits by puncturing out most of the FEC bits. Subsequent retransmissions would send fewer of the systematic bits and more of the FEC bits. The different transmitted versions of the packet containing different combinations of systematic and FEC bits are called redundancy versions (RVs). LTE uses four RVs that are repeatedly sequenced through until the packet is received correctly or until a maximum number of retransmissions have been sent, at which time HARQ declares a failure and leaves it up to ARQ running in radio link control (RLC) to try again. LTE frequency-division duplex (FDD) on the uplink, this time has been set to eight 1ms sub frames. Since it only takes one sub frame to transmit the data, these results in seven sub frames of unutilized bandwidth. To fully utilize this bandwidth, LTE uses

multiple HARQ parallel processes offset in time from each other. Each process transmits a block of data. By the time its next transmission allocation arrives, it will have already received the ACK or NACK (Negative-acknowledge character which means transmission control character sent by a station as a negative response to the station with which the connection has been set up) from the receiving entity and created the next packet for (re)transmission (Fig. 1).

For FDD, there are exactly eight uplink HARQ processes, while the downlink can have up to eight. Downlink HARQ processes can be transmitted in any order without fixed timing (asynchronous HARQ), whereas each uplink HARQ process is assigned to a specific sub frame (synchronous HARQ). The user equipment (UE) transmits within the same HARQ process every eighth sub frames.

Synchronous Versus Asynchronous HARQ

LTE uses asynchronous Type-II HARQ transmission on the downlink. This means the receiver doesnt know ahead of time whats being transmitted (or when), so the HARQ process identifier and the RV must be sent along with the data. The RV specifies which combination of data, ED, and FEC bits is being sent to the UE. This is done through the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) resource allocation messages sent on a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) simultaneous to the corresponding PDSCH transmission. The advantage of this scheme is that the scheduling algorithm has considerable freedom in deciding which UEs are sent data during any sub frame (Fig. 2).

LTE uses synchronous HARQ transmission on the uplink. This means that the eNodeB knows exactly which HARQ process and RV the UE will transmit ahead of time. So, this information doesnt have to be included in the PDCCH (physical downlink control channel) message providing the uplink scheduling information to the UE. Synchronous HARQ can be used because the UE transmits the same HARQ process every eighth sub frame. Because retransmissions of a HARQ process are associated with previous transmissions based on the eight-sub frame delay, the scheduling in the uplink is not quite as flexible as that in the downlink.

Adaptive Modulation and Coding used in LTE:

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) attempts to match the transmissions from a HARQ process to the channel conditions. Under strong signal conditions, less redundancy and/or a higher-order modulation format is employed in the initial transmission, enabling a higher user data rate for a given bandwidth. Under weak signal conditions, more redundancy bits are used and/or a lower-order modulation format is used to improve the probability of reception. However, this lowers the user data rate. If the error rate is zero, then it is likely that too much protection is being applied. Alternatively, if insufficient protection is applied, the same data will be retransmitted, effectively wasting valuable network resources. The ideal situation is where data throughput is maximized at an error rate that is relatively low but greater than zero.

As with W-CDMA, the LTE eNodeB decides on the modulation coding scheme (MCS), depending on information the UE sends in the channel quality indicator (CQI). LTE, though, is more complicated than W-CDMA/HSPA, which requires only a single CQI value to be transmitted. Unlike WCDMS/HSPA, LTE allows a single shared channel transmission to occur on a subset of the possible subcarriers. Given the wide bandwidths provided by LTE, some of the subcarriers could be in fading nulls at the same time others can be received clearly. CQI information from the UE provides channel information measured per sub band or wideband. The networks scheduling algorithm can use sub band CQI to assign sub channel resources for optimum transmission. If the channel characteristics change considerably after the initial transmission, the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is free to assign a different set of sub channels on subsequent transmissions, or to abort that transmission and start a new one using a more appropriate modulation and coding scheme. LTE uses a clever algorithm to implement incremental redundancy and adaptive coding (Fig. 3).

The systematic bits from the turbo encoder are interleaved and placed into a circular buffer called the soft buffer. The redundancy bits are then interleaved and placed after the systematic bits. All the redundancy bits are included in the soft buffer used on uplink transmissions, but upper layers define the number of redundancy bits included for downlink transmissions. Bits are copied from the buffer starting at a position that depends on the RV. The starting position for RVn is approximately n/4 of the way around the circular buffer, plus a fixed offset of two interleave rows. The number of bits pulled from the circular buffer for each RV depends on the target code rate. For poor channel conditions, the code rate approaches 0.1, in which case the entire soft buffer is transmitted multiple times each RV. In excellent channel conditions, the code rate approaches 0.92, which means the number of bits transmitted in each RV is slightly more than the number of bits in the transport block.

Technical Challenges:
The LTE specifications impose constraints on the UE and eNodeB regarding the amount of time they have to complete the HARQ process (Fig. 4).

The receiver has three sub frames to decode the transmission, check the CRC, and encode the ACK/NACK. Assuming the transmitter sent the data in sub frame n, the ACK/NACK must be sent back to the transmitter in sub frame n+4. The transmitter now has three sub frames to decode the ACK/NACK returned from the receiver, construct the next transport block(s) based on the ACK/NACK (this is a job for the RLC and MAC), and encode the transport block(s). The next transport block(s) are transmitted on this HARQ process in sub frame n+8 in the uplink or potentially earlier for the downlink.

Given that a different HARQ process utilizes each sub frame, we can make some assumptions regarding the execution times allowed for each of the processing steps listed above. Assuming only one processing unit for each step is multiplexed in time between all HARQ processes, the computations associated with each step cannot exceed 1 ms. If one of the steps exceeded 1 ms, it would not be able keep up with the continuous flow of HARQ information each sub frame. Drawing some comparisons to WCDMA/HSPA, the current transmission time interval (TTI) for HSPA is 2 ms, and the TTI for LTE will be 1 ms. The current HSPA UL HARQ turnaround time (transmit, received ACK/NACK, transmit again) is a minimum of 16 ms. This reduces to 8 ms for LTE.

Testing LTE MAC HARQ

UE receiver testing to ensure suitable receiver sensitivity and correct interpretation of the downlink is generally straightforward. In many cases, it can be achieved using only a suitably configured downlink to which the UE can synchronize transmitting some repeatable or pseudorandom bit sequence. Almost no signaling or protocol exchange is necessary. Testing HARQ, however, requires a full protocol stack, plus some real data, and of course channels impairments to simulate poor radio conditions. It is only with all of these factors in place that test will be representative of the real world and repeatable in a laboratory environment. Testing real applications at data throughput rates representative of the real world will also allow characterization of the user experience. Test equipment would additionally have to be able to provide the variety of channel conditions and react in real time to changes in CQI values provided by the UE. And, it would have to provide some analysis and debug capability in the case of unexpected results.

Summary
Type II HARQ and AMC work together to provide a very adaptive transport mechanism in LTE. AMC tunes the initial HARQ transmission to use a coding rate that will result in approximately the ideal frame error rate from a throughput perspective. Type II HARQ then uses incremental redundancy to add FEC bits in each successive retransmission, reducing the effective code rate until the packet can be decoded correctly. The result, although not perfect, attempts to optimize the overall throughput over wide ranges of dynamically changing channel conditions. Regards Rami Eyada Rf Planning Team, Motorola r_eyada@hotmail.com

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